“Hi, Raymond,” Melissa said, giving him a hug. “I know, I’m a big girl now.”
“I guess so,” he said, hugging her back. “Have a beer with us? It’s happy hour.”
“I’m too young to drink.”
He brought his Dos Equis out to the living room and took a sip. Then he gestured with his head toward the kitchen and made a questioning face at Melissa. Mary was banging things around in there and ignoring them.
“We’re fighting,” Melissa whispered.
“Scarcely noticeable,” Raymond said.
They sat down on the sofa. “So,” Melissa said, “I had this image of you as my mother’s East Coast beatnik sax-player friend. It’s hard to picture you doing computers in California. Do you have a Porsche or a BMW?”
Raymond hooted at the high ceiling. “Everybody’s young in California, but nobody’s innocent. Those aren’t technical writers driving those cars you see, Melissa. We drive old beat-up Datsuns. I’m the invisible man, the unknown soldier.”
“I didn’t think you were famous or anything.”
“Well, good. No disappointments. And how about yourself, young lady? Porsche or BMW?”
“I’m not getting anything. I don’t like it here. I’m going to live with my father in New York.”
“What’s-her-name said you were thinking about doing that.”
“Not thinking.”
“It’ll be lonely for her without you.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Do you like your new stepfather?”
“Give me a break, Raymond. He’s a junkie. He’s in jail.”
“I know. Did you go to the wedding?”
“She made me.”
He stood up and walked over to the sliding glass doors leading out to the redwood deck. “You’re really going to leave that view out there? Some people would kill for a vista like that. Talk about scenic.”
“I’m not much of a scenic person,” Melissa said.
“Well, let me ask you this, Melissa. Are you much of a Mexican-food person? We’ve got an amazing Mexican dinner coming up.”
“I’m going to a slumber party.”
“They still have those? Incredible. But slumber parties don’t include dinner, do they?”
“This one does.”
“I see. So, first you have your hamburgers and watch a little TV, your favorite hunky star, whoever that is. Then you all put on your jammies and talk about boys.”
Melissa smiled. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Your daughter’s not having dinner with us,” Raymond called into the kitchen. “She has other people she’d rather be with. People her own age. How about that?”
“Grownups are boring,” Mary called back. “We’re old. We don’t understand anything.”
“That’s right,” Melissa said.
Coltrane’s Crescent was playing in the living room. In the kitchen Mary prepared food while Raymond washed the dirty dishes stacked in the sink and all over the countertops. The dishes were left by Joan, the landlady—casseroles and saucepans half-full of moldy food, and numerous plates and glasses. But no silverware.
“I keep saying I’m not cleaning it up again,” Mary said. “I keep pushing it out of the way. If it gets so bad that I can’t cook, I take Melissa to a restaurant or order takeout from somewhere. Finally I can’t deal with it anymore and I clean it all up.”
“There’s no silverware,” Raymond said.
“There is, but Joan doesn’t use it. Silverware frightens her. She eats everything with her fingers.”
Raymond glanced back into the large open atrium of the house.
“She’s not here,” Mary said, “though she’ll probably waft in at some point. She’s in terrible shape. On first glance she looks all right, your basic Berkeley hills woman in her forties—liberal, trendy, narcissistic. She looks like she belongs in a house like this. Then you realize she’s completely tranquillized. She gets doctors to give her whatever pills she wants. She wears expensive clothes but she can’t get it together to take them to the cleaners; she just wears them filthy. She can’t remember things, like turning off the stove. In the middle of a conversation she suddenly stops making sense.”
Mary put her enchiladas in to bake, and then she and Raymond took the nachos and beer onto the deck overlooking the Bay. It was a buoyant early evening, the sky orangy-pink with sunset, electric lights beginning to twinkle down in the cities. A low-lying bank of fog was rolling in across the water like a white coverlet being pulled up to the chin of a sleeper.
“Joan, poor Joan,” Mary said. “She got married and her rich husband moved her into this wonderful place in the wonderful Berkeley hills, and then after a couple of years he found somebody he liked better. I know, a totally new thing in the history of human life. But Joan wasn’t ready for it. Is anybody? Maybe some people are. I’m sure Joan was shaky to begin with, but being disposed of by this guy did damage. She got a lot of his dough plus this house in exchange for letting him go. She has a son who’s about Melissa’s age now. He was only a baby at that point.”
Raymond listened to the music coming through the sliding screen door. The redwood deck seemed to float in space on Coltrane’s sublime improvisations. For some reason Mary was telling him a sad story after he’d finally come all this way to see her, when all he wanted to do was savor the magic of his new life in this amazing place.
She drummed along on the redwood railing with her palm. “So Joan stayed here by herself with this kid, and just drifted into her own little world. She never had the vaguest idea how to manage her life. One day last year she went to the bank and they told her almost nothing was left. She advertised to share the house, to keep going. I loved the land up here so much I figured I could deal with anybody. But she’s too weird, even for me. I have to get out of here when Melissa leaves in the fall. This was mostly for her sake, anyway. I wanted my kid to experience something nice like this, something that wasn’t a rotten city apartment. But nothing I do is right for Melissa. All she wants is to live with her daddy, her wonderful, wonderful daddy.”
“Daughters feel that way about their dads. Especially when Dad’s not around.”
“I know, but this is my daughter. I raised her, pal, raised her by myself with my own two hands. He did nothing, nothing, and all she can think about is being with him. She says she hasn’t stayed with him in a long time, and she’ll be back after a year. She’ll never be back.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. I know it. He’s getting married, by the way.”
“To that same woman he was with?”
“Yeah, to that same woman. The one Melissa likes. The one who is not a black man in prison.”
Raymond tapped the bottom of his beer bottle on the redwood deck and looked out at the lights coming on like fairy dust across Berkeley and San Francisco, remembering the first night he’d ever spent with Mary in Boston. He’d woken up well before dawn to find that Melissa, eight or nine years old, had crawled in under the covers and was sleeping between them. He couldn’t stay in the bed with Melissa there. He got up and sat in the living room, smoking cigarettes and looking at magazines, and finally he went back to sleep on the sofa, where Mary found him in the morning. She explained that Melissa sometimes slept with her when they were alone, and once or twice she’d done it when a man was there. It wasn’t all that peculiar, Mary thought. After a few more visits it started to seem normal, and in the end, when they moved away, he almost felt that Mary was taking his daughter from him—though he knew it was sentimental, and that Melissa didn’t feel that way about him.
“She’s fifteen now?”
“Fourteen,” Mary said. “Making me forty-three. An old lady.” She sipped her beer and smiled at him. “I console myself with the thought that I can still lure a younger man to my romantic cliff dwelling.”
He was five years younger than she was. “Remember that old math problem about ages?” Raymond said. “You start out being twenty-five times older than yo
ur children. Then six times, then four, then two. If you and me and Melissa live long enough, we’ll all be the same age someday.”
Mary laughed. “Brother, you better go back and do that problem again.”
He got up to get some more beer, walking slowly toward the kitchen through the darkening house, stopping to look up at the exposed beams of the high cathedral ceiling, the embroidered woolen floor pillows and wall hangings that looked Peruvian, the polished wooden floors picking up the colorful glow of the sky. He was still having a hard time believing he was in the house where Timothy Leary had lived at the birth of the New Age. He tried to imagine those legendary goings-on in this very place. It made him laugh. A dozen years ago when he’d often thought about Leary, or five years ago in Boston with Mary, or this morning, he would never have been able to predict being here now.
And then, in a stranger’s extravagant house at sunset, the brute unknowableness of life almost overwhelmed him. You couldn’t know what would happen to you in five minutes, never mind tomorrow. You couldn’t know anything. He thought about Christine, who could easily slip out of his life into the vastness of California, the mud slide that might wash this house down the mountain, the earthquakes he’d been trying not to think about since moving to San Jose.
Crescent had finished playing some time ago. Raymond put it on again. He hadn’t heard this music in several years. He watched the advancing digital numbers on the CD machine and breathed deeply in and out. He wanted to enjoy himself, not be frightened or sad. When the old familiar music began to play, the simple fact of it made him happy again.
He brought two more beers out to the deck. Mary reached up for his arm and pulled until he sat down between her legs on the reclining chair. She smiled at him in a specific way, and he recognized the smile, recalled it from years ago. He shook his head. “You can have some shoulder, that’s all.”
She laughed, and then she took him up on it and cried. He held her and patted her back, but saw himself doing this as if from far away. He felt sorry that she was sad, but he himself was not unhappy. He told her everything would be O.K., though in fact he had serious doubts. After a while, through the sliding screen door, they smelled the dinner burning. Mary cursed and laughed at the same time and ran to the kitchen. Raymond found her standing beside a smoking oven, poking a fork into a dish on the counter.
“I forgot to turn it from broil to bake,” she said. “It’s only burned on top, though. It looks O.K. under that. How stupid can you get?”
“I like burned food,” Raymond said. “Really, I do. That carbon tang.”
Mary smiled brightly. “Well, you came to the right place.”
She was reclining against one arm of the long sofa, her legs up on the cushions, talking about something, but Raymond, sprawled the same way at the other end of the sofa, had lost the thread of what she was saying. He had two plates of Mexican dinner and any number of Mexican beers inside him. KJAZ was playing on the FM receiver, and he kept losing himself in the music, or in looking past Mary’s head at the glass doors to the redwood deck. He had wanted to have dinner out there, but the air had suddenly turned too damp and chilly for eating outside. The fog was completely upon them now, and the great vista that had been there before was gone. The redwood deck floated in a pearly void. Even the trees on the slope below the house were invisible.
Raymond sipped from his beer bottle and looked at Mary. She was talking about Charles, he realized, making a complicated point about herself and her husband. He waited until she finished speaking, but the gist of it did not materialize for him. He patted her ankle and smiled. “Everything’s going to be all right,” he said. She nodded her head and seemed reassured by that.
Then the front door of the house opened on the level above them. A woman and a boy stepped onto the balcony and stood there, as if waiting to be asked to come all the way in.
“Joan, what’s wrong?” Mary called up. “Did you have trouble in the fog?”
“It’s foggy out there,” said Joan.
“We had a neat wreck,” the boy said. It had been dark for hours, but he was wearing surfer sunglasses connected to a satin cord around his neck.
“No,” Joan said. “I just couldn’t see.”
Raymond followed Mary to the top of the stairs. Joan held out her car keys for him to take. He put on his jacket and groped along the wooden walkway until he could see that Joan had run her car off the road and into a tree at the top of her steep front lawn. The left front fender was dented and the headlight was broken, but that was all. If she hadn’t hit the tree, she would have come all the way down the slope and through the foggy balcony windows above the living room. He climbed up to the car and started it, and backed it up onto the level part of the road. When he looked down, he couldn’t even see the house.
“Everything’s O.K.,” he told Joan when he returned her keys. She seemed to know that already, or to have something else on her mind. She and her son were still standing aimlessly in the balcony-foyer with their jackets on. “All you have to do is get somebody to bend your fender back. It scrapes the tire a little bit.”
“You could do that for me,” Joan said.
“No, I’m sorry, I can’t. I’d need a crowbar or something, and I can hardly see out there.”
“You could do it in the morning,” Joan said.
“I won’t be here in the morning. I have to leave tonight, soon. You can find somebody else to do it.”
“You can’t drive tonight,” Joan said. “You don’t want to go out there now.”
“Joan, don’t start scaring people,” Mary broke in. “Jimmy,” she said, “is it clear downtown?”
“Downtown is cool,” Jimmy said from behind his shades. He scuffed his checkerboard sneakers on the balcony and plucked at the rubberized printing of his black heavy-metal T-shirt.
“The fog’s just up here,” Mary said. “Happens all the time. Suddenly you drop out of it and it’s crystal clear.”
Joan was staring at a place about a foot below Raymond’s face. When he looked down he saw the wilted dandelion in his jacket lapel. “We were at People’s Park today,” he explained to Joan. “We were reminiscing about it. Remember Flower Power?”
Joan looked at him uncomprehendingly. Finally she said, “There was a big earthquake in L.A. tonight.”
“There was?” Mary said. “Then why didn’t we hear about it? We’ve had the radio on, they would have talked about that.”
“It was a big one,” Joan said. “They said it could travel up here.”
“Joan,” Mary said. “Earthquakes don’t travel. They happen where they happen. If there was an earthquake in L.A., that’s where it was—L.A.”
Joan rubbed her car keys between her hands and breathed deeply. “It’s doing something to the weather up here already,” she said. “Like what a volcano does. Can’t you smell it? Something’s wrong with the weather.”
“Joan, I think you’re really tired,” Mary said. “I think driving in the fog upset you. You need to get some rest. Jimmy, doesn’t your mother seem really tired to you?”
“How would I know?” Jimmy said.
“Well, would you at least try to convince her that everything’s all right?”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Joan, everything’s all right,” Mary said. “Go to bed now, O.K.? Go to bed.” She pulled Raymond’s arm until he followed her downstairs. They collected the dinner dishes from the dining room and stacked them in the kitchen. “Did she freak you out?” Mary asked.
Raymond took his sunglasses from his jacket pocket and put them on. “Yeah, but everything’s cool now,” he said. They giggled.
“California kids are unbelievable,” Mary said. “They’re much worse than we ever were.” She counted the empty beer bottles. “You O.K. to drive?”
“Sure, I’m fine.” He looked at his watch. “It’s later than I thought, though. I better get going. She’ll be worried.”
“You could call her and tell
her you have to stay,” Mary said. She put her arms around him. “If you told her the fog was really bad, that would be the truth. Or your car might not start. This kind of moisture makes a lot of cars not start. It’s really common around here.” She pulled the limp dandelion from his lapel and tossed it on the counter. “But I’ll bet your car is real reliable.”
“Surprisingly so, for such an old one.”
“Just a thought.”
“No harm.”
She put on her slippers and walked him outside to the staircase leading up to the road. His car was barely perceptible up there.
“Can you find your way out of the hills?” she asked.
“How would I know?” Raymond said, bouncing his shoulders and snapping his fingers.
“I can’t let you drive.” Mary laughed. “Get back in my house.”
He looked out at the fog. It wasn’t any better. It might have gotten worse. He tried to think his way back to the highway, but he couldn’t. He decided that driving downhill on any street would eventually get him there. He wouldn’t be able to remember any instructions Mary gave him anyway.
“There’s something wrong with the weather,” he said, and he started to chuckle again. But he wasn’t thinking about the people in this house. He was thinking about music, about how much he used to love to play the saxophone. Tomorrow, he thought, he would start looking for some people to jam with in San Jose.
“It’s so sad,” Mary said. “We shouldn’t be laughing at them. She sort of scared me tonight. Do you really think there was a quake in L.A.?”
“Let me check,” Raymond said. He got down on his hands and knees and put the side of his head against the redwood boardwalk. He stayed like that for a full half-minute or more. He was trying to listen to the earth, to see if today was the day it would shake the humans off its back like a beast they’d provoked. He couldn’t hear anything at all.
He stood up, laughing, and kissed Mary goodbye. “We’re safe for one more night,” he said. “I can’t guarantee anything after that.”
EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOR
Make Me Work Page 15